The latest, and it looks promising. Humans aren’t rodents, but no reason in principle we shouldn’t be able to do similar things.

[Tuesday-evening update]

Intermittent fasting seems to help. I’ve been doing this as part of my weekday routine for a while. I go all day without eating until dinner time, other than coffee in the morning, but it’s mostly out of convenience rather than for health reasons. I’m glad to hear it might be good for me.

The current conflict in Washington, though dismaying, is at least much more comforting than the condition where everyone sings each other’s praises. The whole purpose of oversight, checks, and balances is to avoid the formation of an absorbing Markov transition — a kind of political Hotel California — which you can enter but never leave.

Avoiding a crisis depends on not crossing certain lines and concealing that fact if it has occurred. That has now gone by the board. When a system is undeniably confronted with deceitful lawlessness it is like finding the dealer was cheating at cards. Trump, by officially demanding an answer into whether the previous administration engaged in political spying, is effectively accusing them of cheating at cards. As everybody knows, once you ask this question at a table, the surface game stops and a deeper game begins. Suddenly the little cardboard rectangles don’t matter anymore.

Stay tuned.

[Afternoon update]

I suppose I shouldn’t be, but I’m kind of gobsmacked at the number of people on Twitter, many of whom purport to be journalists, claiming that the Justice Department is “independent of the executive branch.”

OK, so I read this, and the steam that shot out of my ears took the fresh paint off the wall of the kitchen on both sides of the room:

His committee recommended that NASA and the other ISS partners should plan for ways to operate the station with a reduced crew if commercial crew vehicles aren’t ready to enter service by the fall of 2019.

“Given these schedule risks, we recommend the partnership pursue plans to protect for a minimum crew capability to ensure ISS viability during the flight development phase,” he said. “NASA’s biggest priority is maintaining the U.S. presence on the ISS in case the commercial crew launch dates slip.”

One option he mentioned at the meeting is “providing training to Russian crewmembers on the USOS critical systems.” That training, he said, would be provided to cosmonauts scheduled to fly to the station on Soyuz missions in September 2019 and March 2020.

So, let me get this straight: In order to avoid any risk of loss of crew (and there is no way to do that), we are going to not only make ourselves more dependent on the Russians, but further reduce, if not eliminate any actual utility we’re going to get out of a facility in which we’ve invested over a hundred billion dollars and, as a bonus, put that facility at risk.